By Ian Kormos, Marketing and Communications Assistant
If you’ve noticed your district’s liability premiums climbing in recent years, you’re not alone. Across Pennsylvania and the country, school districts are facing a harder insurance market, and much of it traces back to a shift in the type and cost of claims being filed against schools. Here’s what driving it and what it means for your district.
Student Behavioral Incidents Are Leading to More Claims
The challenges schools are facing with student behavior and mental health aren’t just an operational concern. They’re increasingly becoming legal ones. When a student is harmed, when a staff member is assaulted, or when a district is seen as having failed to respond appropriately to a known behavioral issue, the result is often a formal claim or lawsuit.
What’s made this worse in recent years is the loss of the support staff who typically catch up on these situations early. As pandemic-era funding has expired, many districts have reduced access to counselors, social workers, and behavioral specialists — the kinds of roles that often helped address issues before they escalated into something more serious.
The exposure isn’t limited to student incidents. Research and task forces are documenting a meaningful rise in student-to-staff violence, which carries its own compensation implications. Incidents that go unreported only compound the problem over time.
The Cost of Each Claim Has Grown Significantly
Even setting aside how many claims are being filed, the cost of each one has risen sharply. A case that might have settled for a modest amount several years ago can now result in a verdict or settlement many times larger. This is being driven by a broader trend in the legal environment, where juries are returning larger awards against institutions, plaintiff attorneys are more aggressively pursuing cases, and outside investors are funding lawsuits in exchange for a share of the payout.
Schools are a particular target in this environment. Public trust in educational institutions has declined, which influences how juries perceive these cases. Large losses in the education sector are becoming more expensive even in years when the number of claims has gone down.
Student-related liability cases have become more common over time. As behavioral needs have grown more complex and incidents more frequent, more situations are escalating into formal legal action. Districts that may have gone years without a significant claim are finding that the risk environment has shifted, and what once felt unlikely is now a more realistic part of day-to-day operations.
What This Means for Your District
The practical impact is that your district may be paying more for coverage while the market simultaneously makes certain types of coverage harder to obtain or more limited in scope. Carriers have been reducing the limits available on some of the highest-risk coverage categories and at the same time claims in those categories are reaching record values. That gap between what coverage is available and what your actual exposure looks like is something worth understanding and reviewing regularly.
This is a national trend, not an isolated one, and districts that stay ahead of it are the ones asking the right questions now.
It’s a conversation worth having before a claim forces it. If you’d like to walk through how these trends align with your current coverage or where gaps may exist, reach out to your EHD representative and we’ll go through it together.